draft

prioritize maintainability
2024-04-09

tech hype sucks.

i have been around long enough to see the cycle. a
new technology breaks ground. every developer at every
tech company wants to start using it. not because it's a
good idea to use it, but because it's a FUN idea. and all
the big boys are doing it, so it couldn't possibly be a
bad idea.

let's be honest - it's also a good career move. getting
good at Chef in 2009 is getting good with AWS in 2010 is
getting good at kubernetes in 2015 is getting good at
?????ARTIFICIAL???INTELLIGENCE?????? in 2024.

these people make a lot of money and have tons of fun,
and i've done this too, in my earlier years.

bust out some hype new tech
  force it into being implemented
    support it until i can claim success
      bail, leaving other suckers to pick up the pieces

unmaintanable. messes.

in one case, when jenkins was hype a dev crafted a giant
wall of impenetrable  that nobody else could
read, rigged it up to openshift, migrated a few
springboot applications, got promoted then bailed.

can you believe that i had so much trouble tearing it out
that i opted to learn _groovy_? 

another time, it was me. i had been pushing prometheus,
because hey - graphite sucks now, right?

and prometheus is cool, and hot, and good!

the senior engineers around me resisted me at every turn,
but nobody told me no. 

would've spent my time differently. it's not his
fault for building that abomination in an industry that
rewards abomination-building. it's not my fault for
agreeing to take care of it.




it felt kind of fun the first time! getting my hands
dirty with some new piece of tech. but these days i am
more fickle with my time, because i value it more.
because my time is passing, and i'm starting to feel it.

is this what it means to get old??? being more fickle
with the time you have left?



it's not a good use of my time to sweep up last year's
hype. i'll sigh & grab my broom